The responsibility to make that happen, he said, falls on the president.

“The executive’s job is to bring along the legislature,” Bloomberg said. “I don’t want to use the word manage … but it is the executive’s job to explain to the legislators why his or her policies are the right ones and bring them along.”

Goldman Sachs’ Blankfein likened political cycles to economic cycles.

“People are now saying, ‘Gosh, it’s been horrible, it’s never been this bad,'” he said. “Of course it was … We did have a civil war.”

He added that the fragmentation in Congress is not just the fault of the politicians. The electorate should also be blamed for putting people in office who commit to extreme positions.

Asked whether he would consider going into politics, Blankfein said, “I think it would be an attractive thing to do but a very unattractive place to get to.”